“Most people thought that this was going to be a formality, that she was going to be definitively off the hook, cleared of all charges but that was not the case,” CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay tells Inside Edition.
Amanda Knox has been found guilty of criminal slander after returning to Italy, where 17 years ago she was wrongly convicted of murdering her roommate and spent years in prison before being freed.
“Most people thought that this was going to be a formality, that she was going to be definitively off the hook and cleared of all accusations and charges against her but that was not the case,” CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay tells Inside Edition from Florence.
Knox was wrongfully convicted by an Italian court in 2007 of brutally murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher. She first came under suspicion when she was videotaped kissing her then-boyfriend close to the house where the body was found.
Knox served four years of a 26-year sentence. An appeals court overturned the conviction and freed her in 2011.
Accompanied by her husband, Knox returned to Italy to face a charge for making a false statement in 2007, in which she claimed during a police interrogation that a Congolese bartender was Kercher's killer.
“She was sleep-deprived. She had been interrogated for more than 50 hours over the course of several days and it was in this context, this traumatized, sleep-deprived state that, according to her, they used to coerce a false accusation out of her,” Livesay says.
Knox explained why she wanted to return to Italy in her podcast, Labyrinths.
“I am glad I have this chance to clear my name and hopefully that will take away the stigma that I have been living with,” Knox said.
Knox was sentenced to three years in prison for the slander case but because she served longer than that on the murder charge, she was released.
Knox is appealing Wednesday’s ruling.
